I discuss the rise of Islam in my book,

A team led by the University of Basel’s Dominick Fleitmann, a professor of environmental sciences, investigated a stalagmite from the Hoota cave in Oman. Stalagmites are rock formations that rise from the floor of a cave as precipitation, carrying calcium residues, lava, sand and other materials drips down from the ceiling. Fleitman and his colleagues were able to establish rates of precipitation in the cave through the past 1500 years, and showed that there was almost no growth of the stalagmite for several decades in the 500s.

What we now call the Middle East was both familiar and alien in the 500s. The Eastern Roman Empire, with its capital at Constantinople, held what is now Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel-Palestine, and Egypt, administering these provinces in Greek and usually favoring Chalcedonian Christianity, though some emperors had other tastes.

The Sasanian Empire ruled Iran, what is now Pakistan, some of Central Asia, and Iraq.

In 500 CE (A.D.) what is now Yemen was ruled by the Himyarite dynasty, as it had been for several centuries. The Himyarites were caught between the Eastern Romans and the Sasanian Iranians, just as today’s Yemen is an arena of conflict between the US and its allies on the one side and Iran on the other.

Across the Red Sea from Yemen, in what is now Eritrea and northern Ethiopia, the Christian kingdom of Aksum dominated. It adopted the Miaphysite theology in opposition to the Chalcedonian and used the Ge’ez language, old Ethiopic. The kingdom had Greek as the language of some administrative decrees and its theologians studied Greek in Alexandria.

The Himyarite dynasty appears to have turned against the old gods around 380, ceasing to patronize their temples, which fell into desuetude. The kings of Himyar instead begain making inscriptions to the All-Merciful, Rahmanan. Sometimes their inscriptions seem explicitly Jewish, but other instances they seem to be monolatrists, worshiping the Merciful God; one inscription suggests that these Rahmanists sometimes recognized other deities, such as the Jewish Yahweh. In the early 500s, an explicitly Jewish king, Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar, known as Dhu Nuwas, came to power and persecuted Christians in his environments. He may also have tilted to Iran geopolitically, since the Sasanians were Zoroastrians often at war with the Christian Eastern Roman Empire.

Around 520, the king of Aksum, Kaleb, launched an invasion of Himyar.Procopius says that Constantinople put him up to it to ensure that Iran’s proxy could not interfere with Roman trade down the Red Sea and through the Bab al-Mandeb that leads to the Indian Ocean and the trading entrepot of Ceylon (Sri Lanka).

Dhu Nuwas responded by massacring Christians at Najran in 523, creating storied martyrs whose stories provoked grief in Christendom. Ultimately the Aksumite armies defeated him and killed him. For a while, Kaleb’s general,
Sumūyafa Ashwa, became the viceroy of what is now Yemen. Around 531, he was deposed by an Aksumite general, Abraha, who made himself an independent king of Yemen. He persecuted Jews and promoted Christianity, probably dying around 668. He was briefly succeeded in turn by two sons, who fell out with one another, and one of them allied with the Sasanians. Around 570 an Iranian naval expedition conquered Yemen and Iran ruled the area until descendants (abna’) of the Iranian admirals and other officers garrisoned there embraced Islam in the late 620s, according to the later historian Tabari.

The great Classicist, G. W. Bowersock told this story in one of my favorite books, The Throne of Adulis.

So Professor Fleitmann’s stalagmite may help explain the end of the Himyarite kingdom and the rule instead of Aksumite generals for much of the 500s.

That is, Aksum had long been interested in dominating what is now Yemen, but that was a tall order. The country is rugged and Himyar had flourished, with dams and irrigation works. The Romans called it Arabia Felix, Happy Arabia, with the implication of “prosperous.” Wanting to dominate it and being able to were not the same thing.

But if in the 520s Himyar was in the grip of a prolonged drought, the irrigation canals would have dried up and the crops would have withered and the farming villages that may have provided Himyar with its troops would have been starving and weak. Yūsuf Asʾar Yathʾar was likely defeated so handily by the armies dispatched by Kaleb of Aksum because his sources of wealth and power had dried up in the drought.

The establishment of Christianity as the state religion in Yemen was in turn fateful for the religious history of the Tihama, the literal of the Red Sea from Yemen up through the Hijaz to the southern Transjordan. Even as the Transjordan was Christianizing and abandoning the old gods, Yemen was Christianizing, disprivileging the old Jewish court elite.

The successive conquests would have created refugees and slaves in Mecca and Medina, the cities of the Prophet Muhammad, first Jews in Medina fleeing Kaleb’s and Abraha’s persecution, then Christians from 570 fleeing Zoroastrian rule. Some of the audience of the Qur’an were said to be the lower class and slaves in Mecca, and were likely significantly Christian.

Professor Fleitmann and his colleagues have resolved a further piece of the puzzle of pre-Islamic Yemen, adding an important archeological finding to the work on inscriptions of Christian Robin and Iwona Gajda.

Some have argued that Christianity is declining in the Middle East, and this allegation is certainly true in some ways and in some places. If Egyptian Christians declined from 8 percent to 5 percent over the past century, that is a proportional decrease.

But the people who make these arguments are only looking at *proportions* in Egypt, ignoring the tremendous increase over time in the *absolute* number. Moreover, Christians are often disproportionately influential economically or culturally. They aren’t on the verge of disappearing, contrary to what the headlines often suggest.

I’m not starry-eyed and admittedly it is no fun to be a minority in most societies, and radical extremists such as ISIL have targeted them on occasion. The Iraqi community has been devastated, and the Christian villages in Eastern Syria where ISIL gained sway were depopulated. The Christians in Palestine and Israel are under just as much pressure from Israeli Apartheid as other Palestinians.

But the president and chief of staff of Lebanon are Christians. Christians have some power in al-Assad’s part of Syria. Those in Jordan seem fairly well protected by the state and are mostly prosperous. Egyptian Copts have faced some terrorism or just pogrom-like attacks on churches, but they are numerous and powerful in some occupations and some of them are part of the economic elite. Last year they opened an enormous new cathedral.

Let me try to gather the statistics as we now estimate them. The citizen population of Lebanon is about 4 million, and my educated guess is that Christians form about 22 percent. That would yield 880,000 Christian citizens. (Official statistics put them as high as 40%, or 1.6 million). Some of the Syrian and Iraqi refugees (over a million people) are Christian, and it may be they will find a way to stay and become naturalized, increasing the Christian population (this happened to Armenians decades ago). Beirut and Jounieh are places were you really feel Christmas in the Middle East:

MTV Lebanon: “Aishti By The Sea – Christmas Edition”

Egypt is the biggest Christian center in the Arab world, in absolute numbers. Pew estimates Egyptian Christians at 5%, but admits that they may be under-counted. In 1927, when the Egyptian population was about 14 million, there is one estimate that Christians were 8.3 percent of the population. That would have amounted to 1.2 million Christians at that time.

The likelihood is that Christians today in Egypt are about 5-6 percent of the population. But since Egypt’s population growth rate is one of the highest in the world, the country has grown to nearly 100 million. That number would indicate that Egyptian Christians are roughly 5 or 6 million strong, and that their numbers have increased 4 or 5 fold in the last century!

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Even at the low end of current estimates (Copts themselves insist that they are at least 10% of the population), Egyptian Christians if they were their own country would be the size of Norway or Finland. That demographic weight is nothing to sneeze at. Egypt’s Christians celebrate Christmas on January 7.

CGTN: “Coptic Christians in Egypt celebrate Christmas on the January 7 [2018]”

Jordan’s citizen population is around 6.8 million now, and Christians form about 4 percent. That would be about 272,000 Christians today, or over a quarter million. In 1952, Jordan’s population was 586,000, giving 23,000 or so Christians. Christians have thus grown by a factor of almost 10 in Jordan.

Syria may have been 25% Christian in 1920 when the population was 2.5 million. That would have been 625,000. But Christians have probably declined to about 11 percent of the population, in part because they are more likely to be urban and have smaller families than Sunni and Allawi farmers. Syria’s resident population today is 18 million, but roughly another 4 million are outside the country, mainly in Turkey, Lebanon and Jordan, for a total of 22 million. It is likely that the majority of this 4 million will return. Christians would be about 2.5 million. Even with all the refugees and disruption, it seems likely that Syria has about 2 million Christians left. The ones in the Damascus area, most of which the al-Assad regime retained, were relatively protected from the civil war. The number of Christians in Syria has in absolute terms almost quadrupled since the beginning of the French Mandate in 1920.

Iraq is 38 million or so. The Internets say that only about 250,000 Christians are left. Iraq is the one place where the absolute number of Christians actually has fallen. In the 1980s when Iraq’s population was 16 million, the percentage of Christians was thought to be 3 percent, for 480,000. So the number of Christians has been halved in absolute numbers in the past 38 years or so.

There are about 170,000 Christian citizens of Israel. There are roughly 40,000 Christians in the Israeli-Occupied Palestinian territories (Christians find it easier to emigrate to Europe and the US than Muslims, and the pressure on Palestinian Christians of the Israeli squatters makes life unpleasant). Anyway, that is on the order of 210,000 Christians under Israeli rule.

Middle East Eye: “Palestinians perform ‘dabke’ as the Christmas lights go up in Ramallah”

Iran has about 300,000 Christians.

So Copts and other Egyptian Christians, Jordanian Christians, Syrian Christians and Lebanese Christians come to something on the order of 9.2 million.

The Christians in the region if they were all together as one country would be Hungary or Sweden. They have billionaires among them and the Levantine ones are disproportionately likely to be middle class. They are a much smaller proportion of the region’s population than they once were, but they can’t be dismissed as a social and economic and cultural force, and their absolute numbers have soared over the past century.

Proportional decline and absolute dramatic increase is a concept hard to communicate in journalism.

There are substantial Christian populations on the fringes of the Greater Middle East– 12 million or so in South Sudan (and these have a significant diaspora in Egypt), 2.5 million in Eritrea, and 65 million in Ethiopia (alongside 41 mn. Muslims). There are also millions of Filipino and European Christian guest workers in the Gulf, and some Gulf countries like Qatar are moving toward granting permanent residency and have licensed churches, though citizenship is not on offer.

Egyptian media sources have reported that the Mar Mina Church in Helwan, south of Cairo, was attacked this morning, resulting in the death of several people, including the attacker.

The sources reported that an armed gunman tried to raid the church and an exchange of fire occurred between him and a number of security guards. This led to the death of several individuals.

There has been conflicting reports regarding the number of individuals killed, as the Ministry of Interior reported two police officers, as well as the gunman, were killed, while the Health Ministry [initially] reported five were killed and five others were wounded.

Security sources said that the security forces managed to remove an explosive belt worn by the gunman while he tried to raid the church.

Egypt’s Al-Youm Al-Sabea newspaper reported that explosives experts were able to defuse two explosive canisters planted around the church.

Local media has reported that security forces have shut down all churches in Helwan in anticipation of other attacks, after reports of another gunman involved in the attack fleeing the scene.

Creative Commons License This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Via Middle East Monitor

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

Aljazeera English: “Egypt: Another deadly attack on a Coptic church”

Coptic Christians in Egypt have been attacked while traveling on pilgrimages and bombed while praying on Palm Sunday, amid an accelerating series of attacks over the last decade. The interrelated challenges of violence, economics and discrimination have led to the increasing departure of Christians from the Middle East. For centuries they have been part of the rich religious diversity of the region.

So who are these people that National Geographic has called “The Forgotten Faithful”?

Coptic history

Among the Christians of the Middle East, the largest number – some eight million or so – is made up of Egypt’s Copts. Since I first visited Egypt in the 1990s, I have been interested in this community and its contribution to pluralism.

Copts are the indigenous Christian population of Egypt, who date back to the first decades following the life of Jesus Christ. The biblical Book of Acts tells how Jews from Egypt came to Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost, a Jewish harvest festival that marked the birth of the Christian church merely weeks after Christ’s crucifixion. Many of these Egyptians took the message of Christianity back to their own country. Christian tradition holds that St. Mark, one of the early disciples of Jesus, became the first bishop of Egypt.

By the fourth century, the majority of Egyptians had embraced the Christian faith. Even after the Muslim conquest in the seventh century, the majority of Egyptians were still Christians. It was only during the Middle Ages that greater and greater numbers embraced Islam, and the Christian population dwindled.

Today, Egyptian Christians make up approximately 5 to 10 percent of the Egyptian population. The word “Copt” is used for all Egyptian Christians. It is derived from an ancient Greek word that simply means “Egyptian.”

Copts are fiercely proud of their Egyptian heritage that dates back to the age of the pyramids as early as 3000 B.C. The vast majority of Copts are members of the Coptic Orthodox Church, an independent church that arose in A.D. 451, long before the divide that created the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic churches in 1054.

The language of the Coptic Orthodox church service (or liturgy) used in daily worship is also known as Coptic. It is the original Egyptian language written in Greek script.

Copts live throughout every corner of Egypt and at every socioeconomic level. One of Egypt’s richest men, Naguib Sawiris, is a Copt, and so are most of Cairo’s garbage collectors, the zabellin. Though Copts are largely indistinguishable from the Muslim majority, many are given tattoos of a cross on their wrists as children, signifying their permanent commitment to the community. In addition, Coptic women are unlikely to veil, making them stand out from Muslim women.

The head of the Coptic Orthodox Church, and the most significant Christian leader in Egypt, is the bishop of the See of St. Mark, known among Egyptians as the Coptic pope or patriarch. Today the Church is led by Pope Tawadros II, who studied pharmacy before deciding to pursue a religious career in the 1980s.

Religious practice

Copts practice a form of Christianity that hearkens back to the earliest traditions of the church.

Pope Tawadros and all of the bishops of the Coptic Orthodox Church begin their vocation as monks – celibate men living in seclusion in monasteries. The Coptic Orthodox Church is unique in its preference for placing monks in the highest positions of authority.

In fact, the world’s first Christian monks, St. Anthony and St. Paul, established their monasteries in the eastern desert of Egypt in the early fourth century. Both of these monasteries, and numerous others, continue to operate.

In his book “Desert Father,” Australian author James Cowan describes how the monastic tradition became an important support for Egyptian Christians under persecution and helped to preserve culture throughout the Christian world.

Modern-day Copts often visit the monasteries for spiritual guidance, community retreats and to rediscover their heritage.

But while Copts may go to the deserts of Egypt for their religious practice, most live in the cities among their Muslim compatriots. Their churches and community service organizations – and even Coptic news sites and media – contribute to the vibrancy of Egyptian social and intellectual life.

Peter Makari, a church leader with extensive experience working with Coptic organizations, writes about the ways in which Copts have organized community initiatives, development projects and solidarity movements with fellow Egyptians to promote national unity and peace. Copts regularly celebrate feasts with Muslim leaders and host public dialogues with Muslim intellectuals and leaders.

In particular, Copts participated alongside their Muslim compatriots in the proteststhat brought down the authoritarian rule of former President Hosni Mubarak in 2011.

The condition of Copts today

Nonetheless, Copts have faced systemic discrimination in employment and limitations on their ability to access public services and education ever since the establishment of the modern republic of Egypt in 1952.

Governing authorities made it very difficult for them to build or refurbish their churches. After the 2011 revolution, Copts initially enjoyed newfound freedoms to organize and voice their concerns about these practices.

However, their aspirations were dashed when the Egyptian Armed Forces clashed with Coptic protesters in a deadly confrontation in October 2011. When subsequently the Muslim Brotherhood came to power in 2012, there was an attempt to push through a constitution that gave special powers to Islamic authorities. These developments seemed to undermine Copts’ ability to participate as equal citizens.

Most Copts were therefore content to see the restoration of authoritarian rule under Egyptian President Abdel Fatah al-Sisi, who in 2014 introduced a new constitution that limits the role of Islam in Egyptian government.

Unfortunately, the Coptic community has now become an easy target in the fight between al-Sisi and his Islamist enemies. Violent attacks on Copts have led them to flee certain areas of Egypt, such as Sinai, and there is a steady stream of Coptic emigration from Egypt.

This must concern all Egyptians, since the presence of Copts is essential to the health of intellectual, cultural and political life in the Middle East.

Paul Rowe, Professor and Coordinator of Political and International Studies, Trinity Western University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

PBS NewsHour: “Coptic Christians en route to monastery targeted in a deadly assault”

Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) claimed responsibility Sunday for two suicide bombings at Christian churches in Lower Egypt on Palm Sunday, which left over 40 dead and over 100 wounded.

The death toll would have been higher except that an Egyptian policeman stopped the suicide bomber in Alexandria from entering the St. Mark’s cathedral. The terrorist, fearing that his mission would go sideways, detonated his payload there on the street, killing some 17 persons, including the policeman, Emad al-Rokeby, who first stopped him, along with several of his colleagues.

Emad alRokeby, Egyptian police officer paid the ultimate sacrifice to prevent suicide-bomber from entering St. Mark’s Church in #Alexandria. pic.twitter.com/wNcs0mzzsJ

— Rudaw English (@RudawEnglish) April 9, 2017

In all the reporting on this incident, few will note that Muslims sacrificed their lives to protect a Christian congregation.

Egyptian president Abdel Fattah al-Sisi, who came to power in a 2013 military coup against the elected Muslim Brotherhood government, made the attacks a pretext to declare a 3-month state of emergency, suspending most civil rights and allowing police to enter homes without a warrant, cyber police to spy on virtually everyone, and the arrest and jailing without charges of whomever the government wishes. While one doesn’t wish to blame the victim (Daesh is responsible), it is also true that this sort of high-handed authoritarianism does make Egypt less rather than more stable.

Daesh issued a typically juvenile and moronic statement filled with extravagant prose, saying “Crusaders and their apostate allies should know the bill between us and them is very big and they will pay it with rivers of blood from their children, God willing. Wait for us, for we will wait for you.”

Crusaders are the Christian Powers and the apostates or those who are accused of abandoning Islam are the governments with friendly relations with Europe and the Americas. This way of carving up the world, however, is fairly stupid. Many Middle Eastern Christians are local nationalists and have a strong critique of imperialism, so you can’t just sweep them up into a Christian front with Donald Trump, who anyway doesn’t seem like much of a Christian.

Egypt is a country of some 85 million persons. The Coptic Christians form anywhere from 6 to 10 percent of the population, i.e. between 5 and 8.5 million persons. That is, they constitute a Christian community at least as big as Denmark but possibly as big as Austria, within the most populous Arab country (something like 1/5 of all Arabs live in Egypt). Some are poor, some are middle class and some are billionaires. Coptic Christians, one of the older Christian communities in the world, do not play as big a role in politics as their numbers would warrant, in part because Egypt has mostly been a dictatorship since 1952. In a genuinely parliamentary government they would be a sought-after swing vote.

Still, it is no secret that many Coptic leaders and probably most of the rank and file were extremely nervous about the 2012-2013 Muslim Brotherhood government, which they feared would reduce them to second class citizens on account of their being non-Muslims. When Mohammad Morsi was overthrown, angered activists of the Muslim religious right set a number of churches on fire. There have been other incidents, including a church bombing only last December.

Salma Abdel Nasser asks at the Egyptian newspaper Masrawi why Daesh (ISIS, ISIL) targeted two Coptic Christian churches for bombings on Palm Sunday. She enumerates:

* Revenge for the 2013 overthrow of the Muslim Brotherhood government of Mohammad Morsi (though the Coptic Christians had nothing to do with actually making the coup, and Muslim authorities such as the clerics at the al-Azhar Seminary were more consequential in their support for al-Sisi).

* The terrorists know that attacks on Middle Eastern Christians will make front-page news around the world.

* They know that deaths of minority members reflect poorly on the Egyptian government, showing it up as incompetent, and putting pressure on it.

* Depicting Egypt to the international community as a country in turmoil from the point of view of politics, society, and the economy.

One could add to this list an attempt to harm tourism to Egypt, which has fallen off substantially since 2010. It was still over 11 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product in 2015, but suffered a steep decline in 2016, and … now this. (Statistically speaking, there is no particular danger in going to Egypt, which is generally if anything way too safe, as with most police states).

Finally, as always with sectarian terrorism, Daesh is attempting to sharpen contradictions. If it can get the Christians’ goat and make them lash out at Islam and Muslims, it can then set offended Muslims on them, and create a snowballing atmosphere of sectarian hatred in which moderate Muslims have to get off the fence and decide whose side they are on. Daesh pursued this strategy effectively in Iraq with regard to ramping up Sunni and Shiite tensions, until in 2014 they managed to take over the Sunni Arab areas of Iraq.

They aren’t likely to succeed in Egypt, where the urban population (a slight majority) mostly despises Muslim radicalism, and where rural Egyptians are a mix of Sufis, traditionalists, and even old-style Nasserist leftists. The population base for the Salafi Jihadis is mostly absent in Egypt, except in the Sinai, which is why they are carrying out desperate bombings like the one on Sunday.

The biggest danger is not that the Copts will fall for their tricks but that the Egyptian government will, ramping up its authoritarianism to the point where it alienates the general population (most of whom are quite young), the way Hosni Mubarak (in office 1982-2011) did.

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Related video:

CGTN: “Dozens killed in terrorist attacks at churches in Egypt”

Via Al-Bab.com

The Coptic cathedral explosion has reportedly killed 25 people and injured dozens more.

A crowd gathered outside Cairo city’s biggest Coptic Christian cathedral Sunday morning chanting, “Tell the sheikh, tell the priest, Egyptians’ blood is not cheap!” after a deadly bombing killed at least 25 people in the worst attack on the country’s Christian minority in years.

Mourners gathered at the site of a bomb explosion at St. Peter’s Church, where an explosive device lodged adjacent to one of the cathedral’s walls exploded that same morning, killing 25 people and injuring some 49 others.

Cathedral worker Attiya Mahrous, who rushed to the chapel right after he heard the blast, said: “I found bodies, many of them women, lying on the pews. It was a horrible scene.”

“Everyone was in a state of shock. There were children. What have they done to deserve this?” said another eyewitness, Mariam Shenouda. “I wish I had died with them instead of seeing these scenes.”

The head of Al-Azhar, Egypt’s top Sunni authority, condemned the bombing, calling it as “a great crime” against all Egyptians.

Mohamad Elmasry, an associate professor of Media and Cultural Studies at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies, agued that the “barbaric attack against Coptic Christians is not an aberration.”

“[The attack] represents the continuation of a cycle of violence that has continued unabated since Egypt’s July 2013 military coup,” Elmasry told Al Jazeera. “Since the coup, the Egyptian government and ISIS-affiliated terrorists have traded attacks. The government has cast an unnecessarily wide terrorism net, carrying out unprecedented human rights violations, including several mass killings, against moderate members of the political opposition.”

Sunday’s deadly attack is the second to hit Cairo in two days. Six policemen were killed Friday in a bomb explosion that was claimed to have been set off by a group suspected to have links to the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood.

Authorities Fail to Prevent, Punish Violent Attacks

(Tunis) – A long-awaited new law maintains restrictions over the construction and renovation of churches and discriminates against the Christian minority in Egypt. The law, passed by Egypt’s parliament on August 30, 2016, applies only to Christian houses of worship.

Recent incidents of anti-Christian violence that left one person dead, several injured, and numerous properties destroyed were prompted or preceded by anger among some local Muslims over actual or alleged church construction. Even when authorities have made arrests, they have rarely prosecuted suspects, creating a climate of impunity for violent crimes that target Christians.

“Many Egyptians hoped that governments would respect and protect freedom of religion, including for Christians, after the 2011 uprising,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch. “Instead, the authorities are ignoring the underlying systemic issues and sending a message that Christians can be attacked with impunity.”

The website of Al-Youm al-Sabaa newspaper published the law and explanatory memo on August 30.

The new law allows governors to deny church-building permits with no stated way to appeal, requires that churches be built “commensurate with” the number of Christians in the area, and contains security provisions that risk subjecting decisions on whether to allow church construction to the whims of violent mobs.

Estimates of the size of Egypt’s Christian population, the great majority of them Coptic Orthodox, range from 6 percent to 10 percent of the total population of 93 million. Authorities have done little in the years since the 2011 uprising to change policies that have long disadvantaged their community.

President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi pledged to respect freedom of belief and made important visits to Coptic Christmas masses. Authorities, however, have failed to protect Coptic Christians from violent attacks and instead enforced “reconciliation” sessions with their Muslim neighbors that deprive them of their rights and allow attackers to evade justice. In some cases, Christians were obliged to leave their homes, villages or towns.

Pew Research has released a report saying that

“As a whole, the region continued to have the highest levels of religious hostilities in the world. In 2014, the median level of religious hostilities in the Middle East and North Africa reached a level four times that of the global median.”

But is there another way to look at this data? Is it really all about religion?

Pew does excellent polling and I’ve used their work a great deal, e.g. in my Engaging the Muslim World . And the good thing about their polling is that they are very up front about their assumptions and methodology.

This is what they mean by “religion”:

“For the purposes of this study, religion-related terrorism includes acts carried out by subnational groups that use religion as a justification or motivation for their actions.”

So a “subnational” group might well be driven primarily by nationalism, but if its members commit terrorism that is “religion-related,” then it gets counted under the sign of religion.

Social scientists talk about people having “markers” of identity. Language and religion can be such markers, as can constructions like “race.”

In the context of Protestant Britain, Irish immigrants in the 18th century were coded as Catholics or “papists.” Where there were mob attacks on them, however, it would be difficult to prove that the fine points of theology were always the main drivers of the violence. Some of it was social class, some of it was “race.”

So it isn’t easy to disentangle religious motivations from nationalist ones.

Pew adds

“Religion-related terrorism also includes terrorist acts carried out by individuals or groups with a nonreligious identity that deliberately target religious groups or individuals, such as clergy. ”

So what Pew is really measuring is not religious fanaticism at all, but the prevalence of symbolic targets that are religious in nature.

So if two secular groups fought and a religious symbol was harmed, the incident in this study would be classified as religious violence.

In social science, you have wide latitude in making your definitions, as long as you clarify your terms to begin with.

What Pew is actually saying is that in the Middle East and North Africa, people are four times as likely to act out their ethnic violence by attacking religious symbols as in the rest of the world. It isn’t saying they are four times as likely to be religious fanatics.

My guess is that the Middle East is unusually religiously pluralistic, and this is especially true of the Levant to the Gulf. Whereas Poland is almost entirely Catholic, Iraq is 60 percent Shiite and 37 percent Sunni (counting Arabs and Kurds).

There are also relatively high rates of religious belief in the region. If you wanted to hurt a member of another ethnicity, you’d know that striking their religious edifices or clergy, etc., would hit them hard. Thus, al-Qaeda’s destruction of the Shiite Golden Dome shrine of the eleventh Imam in Samarra in 2006 set off an Iraqi civil war. You couldn’t hurt the feelings of very many French by taking a sledge hammer to a gargoyle.

A lot of the violence that gets coded in the US press as religious is actually about nationalism. This principle holds especially true in Palestine-Israel.

But take Syria. Some observers suggest that the Lebanese militia, Hizbullah, which is Shiite, intervened in Syria to help the Alawites, also Shiites. But they don’t belong to the same branch of Shiism. Most Lebanese Shiites belong to the orthodox Twelver school, with mosques, collective Friday prayers, clergymen, etc. Alawites are heterodox– lacking mosques and having wise men rather than seminary-trained clergymen. Most Sunni and Shiite Muslims don’t consider the Alawites to be Muslims. Moreover, many Syrian Alawites are members of the Baath Party, which is highly secular and socialist. So Hizbullah did not come into Syria for reasons of religious sympathy. They came in because the Baath, secular government of Syria is a vital supply route for Hizbullah.

So if a Sunni mosque was shelled by Baath Party members because even relatively secular Sunni opposition groups were hiding behind it, Pew would count that as religious violence in this study.

That outcome is legitimate, since they defined their terms to begin with. But as consumers of such studies, we should be careful about how we use the findings. They aren’t saying what we might at first assume they are. In polls as in consumer purchases, always read the fine print.

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Related video added by Juan Cole:

U Chicago Social Sciences: “PANEL 2: Religious Minorities in Syria’s Civil War | Keith Watenpaugh”